Risk-Based Planning and Scheduling (RPS) with Simio

Why your ERP/APS is Lacking!

Companies have made significant investments in their ERP systems; however these systems typically fall short with detailed production scheduling. Although there are a number of Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) products on the market designed to integrate detailed production scheduling into the overall ERP solution, these solutions have some widely recognized shortcomings. For the most part the ERP system and day-to-day production remain disconnected.

A critical problem with the traditional APS approach is that it requires that all the data be fully known and deterministic. For example all processing times must be fixed and there can be no unexpected events or delays. Hence the resulting schedule with APS is by nature optimistic, and is typically very different from what occurs in the real facility. It is common that what starts off as a feasible schedule turns infeasible over time as variation and unplanned events degrade performance. It is normal to have large discrepancies between predicted schedules and actual performance. To protect against delays the scheduler must buffer with some combination of extra time, inventory, or capacity; all adding cost to the system.

How Risk-based Planning and Scheduling Can Help You

Risk-based Planning and Scheduling (RPS) extends traditional APS to fully account for the variation that is present in nearly any production system, and provides the necessary information to the scheduler to allow the upfront mitigation of risk and uncertainty. Simio provides a family of products that let you leverage your existing investment in planning systems, such as SAP's APO, to finally close the gap between master planning and detailed production scheduling, thereby driving more revenues and greater customer satisfaction at reduced cost with existing assets.

Simio's family of RPS products (patent pending) allows for flexible scheduling strategies to support your key production objectives and lets you quickly reschedule in response to unplanned events. You can accurately model your complex production processes to capture all critical constraints so that the resulting schedules reflect the reality of your systems. You can display schedules in a wide range of outputs, including interactive Gantt charts that display individual waiting times at critical resources as well the root causes for non-value added time in the system. Simio products also integrate a 3D animation of your planned schedule to provide a unique and insightful preview of your facility operations. Simio's RPS solution is built on the popular and widely used Simio simulation engine and can be flexibly applied across a wide range of industries.

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